Nicole's Little Academy

We’ve been exploring England all week long! ✈️🇬🇧 I posted our Monday and Tuesday adventures, but Wednesday and Thursday were so packed with immersive action that I’m just now catching up! Absolutely no worksheets over here, just pure, hands on learning.
Here is how we wrapped up our London travels:
🎨 Paint splatter number tracking with our paint bucket
👑 Designing Queen crowns & racing from room to room to match the crown jewels
☎️ Color, cut, and scissor practice with classic English telephone booths
🥪 A full "coffee & tea party" complete with fruit punch, lemonade, and tea sandwiches!
🚌 AND... our custom school tour bus is officially finished and open for tours!
I build the experience from scratch so the learning sticks. Just another regular week of turning the classroom into a whole new world! 🌍✨

🎩 Monday: A Whimsical Journey to Wonderland
We kicked off our week by reading "Katie in London" and diving straight into a day of fairytale fun!
Mad Hatter’s Tea Party: We practiced our alphabet recognition by sorting whimsical, lettered teacups and dropping them directly into the Mad Hatter's secret tea chest!
Fine Motor Skills: The kiddos got busy with scissor practice, cutting and coloring their very own classic red London double decker buses.
Creative Art: We rounded out the day with a "T is for Teacup" dot marker activity and a beautiful Alice in Wonderland themed craft.
👑 Tuesday: High Tea & Royal Colors
Today was all about royal treatment and sensory exploration! We read "Polka Dot Tea Party" and even enjoyed delicious, traditional scones for snack time.
The Queen’s Color Match: To burn off some energy and practice color recognition, the kids had an absolute blast running from room to room, matching colored cards to the gorgeous gowns on our Royal Queen wall!
Sensory Art Studio: For our big craft project, we took hands on learning to a whole new level and painted with real tea! The room smelled amazing, and the kids loved experimenting with the different warm tones and shades the tea created on paper.
Royal Literacy: We wrapped up our studio time with a "Q is for Queen" dot marker activity and a cute tea-themed cut and color project.
From Wonderland to Buckingham Palace, our days have been filled with moving, creating, and giggling.
Take a peek at our royal travelers in action! 📸👇

🌍 Passport to Adventure: Exploring the Maasai and Yoruba Tribes! 🥁
We wrapped up our incredible journey through Africa late last week with two days packed full of hands-on learning, culture, and rhythm!
✨ Day 1: Visiting the Maasai Tribe
We traveled to East Africa to meet the Maasai people, famous for their stunning, vibrant beadwork.
The Marketplace: Our little merchants practiced their literacy skills by hunting for "lettered jewelry" and hanging it up for sale on our market board!
Creative Expression: We put on our artist hats and painted our very own beautiful versions of traditional Maasai statement necklaces.
🥁 Day 2: Journey to the Yoruba Tribe
Next, we headed to West Africa for a day filled with storytelling and music! We kicked things off with an interactive safari story time, reading "A is for Africa."
Market Day: To practice our alphabet, the kids searched for lettered fruits to fill up a massive, colorful market basket!
Feel the Beat: For our big craft project, we painted our own djembe drums. Once they dried, we turned up the energy and had a blast practicing our rhythms and drumming together!
The kids absolutely loved getting to "travel" the world, build their skills, and bring these rich traditions to life through play and art.
Check out our little explorers in action! 📸👇

Africa is so vast, rich, and full of distinct cultures that trying to squeeze it into a single week doesn't do it justice. Our academy is taking a deep, structured dive into the beautiful details of these traditions and the developmental breakthroughs have been incredible! 🌍✨
Here is a look at our Monday and Tuesday blueprints in action:
🎨 Monday (The Ndebele Tribe): We explored the stunning, geometric secret language painted onto traditional Ndebele homes. Historically, Ndebele women painted these vibrant, hidden symbols on their outer walls as a silent way to express continuity and identity. The kids put their own shape recognition to the test by matching these geometric symbols right onto our custom house layout, mapped out the letter N with dot markers, and completed an Ndebele house cut and color craft before building their own miniature 3D Ndebele houses!
📿 Tuesday (Rhythm, Color & Fine Motor): We read "My African Vacation" and practiced color identification with a brilliant interactive game. The kids matched traditional, vibrant Ndebele doll cards and placed them directly into the woven basket on our realistic house backdrop scene! In South African cultures, intricate beadwork isn't just decoration, the colors and patterns are used like a visual code to tell stories about a person's life. We linked this together by practicing intense concentration and bilateral coordination, threading colorful beads onto a textured portrait of a tribal woman's hair, before working on our letter D Djembe drum dot markers. We also launched a wild cheetah mask project that we’re putting the finishing touches on this afternoon!
The absolute highlight? The exact second the new visual gallery went up on the window grid, the feet kicked up, the room went completely calm, and total quiet focus took over. They don't need words to show us they are absorbing the history, their focus says it all.
Check out our photos to see our brilliant investigators crushing their goals this week!

🌍✈️ Next Stop: Ancient Egypt! 🛶✨
Our little historians went on a grand journey back in time this week, leaving behind the modern world to explore the wonders, myths, and magic of the Nile! Through immersive cinema style backdrops and hands on discovery, we looked past old myths to find the real heart of Egyptian history.
So many people are focused strictly on the mainstream labels or the false narratives left in standard history books. This week, I loved showing the kids a completely different, deeper side to these ancient figures that most people completely miss!
Here is a look at our incredible week of learning:
🌅 Tuesday: Fun on the Nile with Sekhmet
We kicked off our journey by learning that Sekhmet wasn’t the bloodthirsty figure often portrayed in history books. Instead, she was a deeply devoted, primal protector. Our stunning backdrop brought this to life, showing her peacefully playing with children right at the riverbank.
⛵ Math & Play: We practiced our number recognition by adding numbered toy boats into the Nile so we could join in on the fun!
🎨 Creativity & Literacy: We crafted custom Sekhmet headbands, completed a beautiful cut and color Sekhmet project, and used dot markers for a classic Sphinx. For story time, we set the mood by reading Sailing Down the Nile.
🏺 Wednesday: Guarding the Tomb with Anubis
On Wednesday, we introduced the kids to Anubis. Far from being some scary, dark god of the underworld, we focused on his true energy: a fiercely loyal guardian and a proud, protective dad. It is a beautiful, nurturing side of him that history often skips over. Our backdrop showed him watching over a pharaoh's tomb like a proud father while a Royal Painter carefully illustrated history onto the stone walls.
📿 Color Recognition: The kids matched and added vibrantly colored ancient necklaces directly into the pharaoh’s tomb collection.
🐫 Creativity & Literacy: We dove into the classic Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile. For our daily crafts, we made adorable camel projects, completed an Anubis cut and color, and knocked out a "C is for Camel" dot marker page.
📜 Thursday: Shapes & Ancient Engineering
We wrapped up our spectacular tour by reading The Tiny Traveler: Egypt (A Book of Shapes) and exploring how ancient people actually lived and created!
📐 Shape Recognition: Our little explorers identified geometric shapes by matching and delivering custom "sealed scrolls" straight into the tomb's artifact barrels.
🌾 History & Science: We learned that true Egyptian paper was an engineering marvel crafted from reeds growing thick along the Nile River. The kids rolled up their sleeves and got beautifully messy making their very own handmade, textured versions of Egyptian paper using wet, layered strips! We finished the day with an "E is for Egypt" dot marker page and a detailed sarcophagus cut and color project.
From ancient mythology to hands on science and engineering, these tiny travelers brought history to life this week!

🏛️ Going for Gold in Ancient Greece! 🏅 (Tuesday–Thursday Recap)
Between training like ancient athletes and celebrating special friendships, these past few days at the Academy have been unforgettable!
We kicked off our week diving into Greek mythology, reading "Please Share, Aphrodite" and "Goodnight Greece." Our interactive learning time was full of math and color practice—the kids helped Apollo count out his musical golden lyres, and later helped Aphrodite sort and collect beautiful matching flowers into her basket against our gorgeous temple backdrop!
We also worked hard on our fine motor skills, practicing "I is for Ice Skating," "R is for Running," and "Z is for Zeus" with our dot markers, alongside creating musical puppets and flying Pegasus crafts.
By Thursday, the real excitement began! After reading about Greek Gods and Goddesses and practicing our shapes by sorting medals into lockers, the kids competed in our very own Academy Olympics! We tested our skills in the long jump and cheered each other on during a massive sprint across the finish line, where every single champion earned a gold medal! 🥳
To wrap up an amazing week, we shared a beautiful, bittersweet moment saying goodbye to Sal. We surprised him with a memory album filled with photos of his favorite moments with us. We will miss his bright smile so much, but we are sending him off with so much love into his next chapter!
Check out the photos to see our little Olympians in action! 👇✨

What a magical Monday of discovery at the Academy! 🇬🇷✨

Today, our global tour took us deep into the history of ancient Greece. We started our morning reading "Brush Your Hair, Medusa!" and talked about Greek historical figures and gods as the original "superheroes" with unique powers and stories🦸‍♂️⚡️. To keep the theme fun and perfectly age appropriate, we shared a beautiful, reimagined story of Medusa! Instead of focusing on the unfair old myths that painted her as a monster, our version honors her true spirit a strong, kind, and helpful person. Our amazing kids used their imagination to help Medusa fill her basket with sweet blackberries (you can see them actually placing the paper berries into her basket on our custom backdrop!). 🧺🍇 We even used our berries to practice our letter recognition!
Afterwards, we learned how the ancient Greeks created the Olympics to show off their superhero strength. After watching some incredible Olympic gymnastics clips, we worked on our "G is for Gymnastics" dot marker pages and practiced our fine motor skills by cutting out our very own laurel wreaths🌿🏆. We rounded out our busy day designing custom Greek pottery, and even though our friend Sal had to take off a little early, we made sure to send our birthday boy home with a special cupcake and present to celebrate his belated birthday! 🎂. Safe to say, Athens has been an absolute blast so far!